Posted
by
Soulskillon Monday March 26, 2012 @03:16PM
from the why-is-japan-so dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news that a Tokyo District Court has granted its approval to a petition seeking to force Google to turn off the auto-complete feature for its search engine. "The petition against Google was filed by a Japanese man who claims the feature breached his privacy and eventually led to the loss of his job. According to the man, whose name has been withheld, when his name is typed into the Google search engine auto-complete suggests words associated with criminal behavior. And when those suggested searches are clicked, over 10,000 results are shown that disparage or defame him. According to the plaintiff, this negative Google footprint has prevented him from finding employment since his initial firing several years ago." Unfortunately for him, "Google has rejected the order, saying that its U.S. headquarters will not be regulated by Japanese law, and that the case, according to its in-house privacy policy, does not warrant deleting autocomplete-suggested terms related to the petition, lawyer Hiroyuki Tomita said Sunday."

One annoyance is that your instant settings are stored in the site cookies, not your Google account, so even if you are logged into GMail it will not remember that you turned instant off if you clear your cookies.

A lot of places over there present search terms rather than URL's as references for objects. This is in the majority of advertising. It is wrong, but it is what is commonly done. They have confused address with search. And this is the result

What? Did you even read the same summary as I did? Wait - don't answer that.

He's complaining because when you type his name into google, the auto-completion suggests adding words to the end of your search, which leads you to ten thousand or so pages that indicate he's a criminal.

If you read the article carefully, it seems his name is the equivalent of "whose name has been withheld", and sure enough, the newspapers here are full of stories... "the drunk driver, whose name has been withheld...", "the armed bank robber, whose name has been withheld...", "the child rapist, whose name..."

Is it really his name, does he own that name, is that name unique or is that name shared with many others. Whilst a person uses that name, it can not be said that they own that name unless that name is truly unique.

Your name is not accepted for legal reasons as your sole identifier, in fact your name, your date of birth, your address are all required to minimally to legally identify you, further add in your appearance, fingerprints and now DNA for full identification.

You mean that out of the 7 billion people on this planet, there might be one with the same name? And he might be a criminal? GASP.
No, what am I saying? That's crazy talk. Only one person can have that name, so clearly he did all those terrible things.
Secretary? Go fire that guy in cubicle 3. Google said he's a criminal.

Maybe he actually did whatever it is that Google suggests his name is associated with? I have an acquaintance who got busted for dealing cocaine a while back. Now, Google's auto-complete suggests his name if you type in only the first three letters of his first name and surname - and if you complete the name, then it suggests two searches ("John Doe Town" and "John Doe Drugs") - both searches lead to pages of news sites about the drugs bust and his prosecution. Clearly, this is going to make it difficult fo

You would be surprised how many employers will reject a potential employee based on unfounded roomers. Even if his skills are needed, many will simply say "why take the risk" and many employers have the mentality that to get the job you need to be from the top 1% and spotless. Trust me on this

Roomers, seriously? Anyway, it's not like candidates are that transparent. Usually you end up with a pool of them that haven't really disqualified themselves in any way, that all look like "okay" workers but you won't know which are the lemons and which are actually good. If you find a reason to disqualify one, great the pool just got smaller. They don't have to be ivy league with honors, but if you're "marked" there's plenty fish in the sea that are not. In all honestly both in the job interviews I've done

And corporations built with people like these are probably going to cause you grief when you have all the buzzwords but do not conform to their idea of corporate culture: You're a replaceable cog in a machine. You are an interchangeable part with a heartbeat.

If I'm ever rejected because of Google's auto-complete, I will consider it a bullet well-dodged.

Will the UIDs be recycled after the person dies? If not, eventually the world would reach a point where everyone alive will have names like 4617546513210234106654697454789854210352410005451851242124784135412324520515. Not much for brevity.:)

The guy has a name. When you time the first 3-4 letters of the name, google autocompletes the name with a Crime word, which links to 10,000 entries about said crime. And the HR lady who is looking at this results thinks the guy is a criminal, so she puts his resume in the reject pile.

I don't see how that is Google's fault. That's the fault of stupid HR ladies who don't know how to do a proper search (i.e. finish typing the guy's name).

"The auto-complete function in Google's search bar fills in crimes when my client's name is entered,"... a false story about him containing allegations apparently spread across various sites, which were then indexed by the search giant

So basically you type "Glenn Beck" and it suggests that you add "murdered girl in 1990" to the search. Except that the guy's actual name and the crimes were, of course, withheld.

"According to the man, whose name has been withheld, when his name is typed into the Google search engine auto-complete suggests words associated with criminal behavior"

This doesn't sound like a partial search to me as you're saying.

Also from TFA:"Another online reputation dustup occurred just last year when a British business owner was falsely accused of being a pedophile in a Google Places review. Google eventually removed the review, but not before the business owner lost, according to his own estimates, roughly 80 percent of his business."

Google makes money on searches. Google needs to pony up when they fuck up someone's life.

Rick Santorum's name didn't turn up defamatory results on a Google search until he started claiming that sexual acts between consenting adults were morally equivalent to sexual acts involving children and animals. In other words, that's satire and political speech, not a mistake.

Arguably people looking up "santorum" are likely to be looking for the sexual neologism, as opposed to those looking for "rick santorum". As a result, the higher rankings for 'santorum' are the search feature working as designed.

Also, whoever modded me "Flamebait", that looks an awful lot like "I disagree with this person's political leanings", when everything I wrote was simply verifiable fact about Rick Santorum's Google problem:Rick Santorum's original comments [usatoday.com] Dan Savage [nytimes.com] on why he found those comments offensive.

1. There are international treaties and laws governing copyright enforced by Interpol.2. Please point me to a single official statement from the White House or American ambassador on this3. Assange has never been charged with a crime in the US. The US has not filed for his extradition. Megaupload had severs in the US that broke US law.4. If you do business in a country you are bound by those laws. Google had to abide by Chinese laws in China for example. So they shifted traffic to servers in Hong Kong where laws are different. This isn't a difficult concept and it is global.5. You've made a litany of unfounded, untrue statements.

You would be correct if you suggested that the US government has encouraged nations to pass copyright protection laws. But even in doing so, they acknowledge that each country has its own legal jurisdiction and legal system. The United States arguably doesn't have any exports nearly as important as IP, so the government tries to protect those interests in negotiating with other nations. It is in the best interest that they do so.

I'm reading the judge's decision right now, and according to UK law, if you break a foreign law that would also be a criminal offense in the UK, you can be extradited for it. So the judge ruled he was breaking UK copyright law, but is allowing the US courts to handle the case.

7. Extradition – Offence/Dual Criminality.S.78 (4)(b) Ex Act 2003 requires this court to be satisfied the conduct involved if committed in the U.K. would be an offence against the criminal law. SpecificallyS.137 (2) (b) requires:“the conduct would constitute an offence under the law of the relevant part of the United Kingdom punishable with imprisonment for a term of 12 months or a greater punishment”.

The thing to note is that they haven't gone after people hosting the files. The US government has gone after people specifically making money from copyright infringement.

follow this link and read the 5 search engine. Seriously guys, theres more than google out there. This is just a small example. I'm pretty sure other search engines exists that are better than Google and not mentioned here

It strikes me that this is more a problem with our society's mindset rather than it being a problem with auto-complete or related search terms. I think most of us on here can grasp how many people may have the same names, or rather, just because one term is popular with another doesn't mean you've found a correlation of what exactly you had in mind. But we skew very highly for technical people on here.

What about the population in general? I would say most people aren't familiar with the search and correl

The burned bodies were *at the resort* because there had been a huge explosion there that killed many people. The resort was trying to censor history of the event because, much like a house in which the previous occupants had all been murdered, it was affecting their business.

The resort wasn't really trying to censor history, they were just trying to make it so a simple search on the resort name didn't turn up primarily references to links to the event rather than (or at least with higher ranking than) links to info on vacationing there. They were fine with more explicit searches for info on the explosion working as usual.

Seems to me that the HR flacks are not doing their job properly if they associate a search cloud with the work history of a prospective hire. If I do a search for a person and "autocomplete" gives me unusual results, I don't immediately stop typing and have a spaz-- I take an extra second to finish the search. I can't even see how this could be considered a form of libel or slander, as in the "Santorum" situation (which I find to be hilarious, and not slander at all BTW). This guy's beef is with the HR departments, not the company that makes tools used by the lazy HR drones.

Google is working exactly as it should-- associating popular searches with similar words. Let's say my name is Killroy, Bob-- does the judge really think that upon typing in "Kill" and upon seeing the following results: "killer elite, kill the irishman, kill bill, killer whale" the reasonable choice is to stop typing assume the applicant is a killer whale? Absurd.

On a related note, I made a JAVA applet that uses autocomplete to generate "food" for little animated "animals": AutoComplete Hive Mind Cannibals [vimeo.com]. I LIKE autocomplete, it is a weird profile of what people search for and what associations they make.

Wouldn't it make more sense for him to change his name rather than put up with the supposed cause of his employment woes for seven years? It sounds suspicious to me. It seems more likely there are other underlying reasons why he gets fired.

Michael Bolton: Yeah, well, at least your name isn't Michael Bolton.
Samir: You know, there's nothing wrong with that name.
Michael Bolton: There *was* nothing wrong with it... until I was about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.
Samir: Hmm... well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
Michael Bolton: No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.

It's not so easy to change your name in Japan. First, your name is recorded in a family register. All citizens of Japan must be in a register. If you aren't you lose a lot of legal rights. When you get married, you *must* have the same name as your spouse, though either the man or the woman can change their name. When you change your name you must change it to your spouse's name. You can't make up a new one.

There are a few other times where you are allowed to change your name in the register, but you

So wait... Someone with his name apparently committed some crimes that were substantial enough to warrant being memorialized on the internet.

He's not suing for libel or anything, he's suit for invasion of privacy. Does that mean he DID commit those crimes?

There is so much fail in this I don't know where to begin:-Not hiring someone because of an unsubstantiated internet search-Suing google, demanding the disabling of a perfectly good feature instead of asking google to somehow adjust their indexes-(Potentially) committing crimes that get you plastered all over the internet in the first place.

We don't have "Social Security" numbers, or any such tracking numbers in Japan. That makes it more difficult to cross-check people with the same name.

Japanese companies are risk averse to the extreme and even if the chance that the man is the criminal referenced by Google is 0.000000001%, that may be enough to disqualify him for a job. Companies will not want the press, the tabloids or police anywhere near company property, even if it is a case of mistaken identity.

Yahoo is the search engine king in Japan. The man would not have had this problem years ago or before Google's entry into the Japanese market. He is not suing Yahoo, only Google.

Google has a registered company, an office, bank accounts, employees and a co.jp domain name, which can only be purchased with a physical address in Japan.

He was not asking for a monetary reward. He will have to now in order to get Google's attention.

I think the people taking Google's side in this would change their tunes if it was them and they were in Japan.

Add to that the way that with on-line recruitment sites, when you place a job ad you get hundreds of responses from people who have training and experience only tangentially associated with the role you are recruiting and any easy way to reduce down the number of applicants you have to study in depth is welcome.

Obviously with a.jp domain name and a registered office in Japan, Japanese courts are going to have a difficult time believing that Japanese law doesn't apply.

What's not clear from the article is whether or not the guy did all of the things that are found when you search his name.

If he didn't, then it seems a simple matter to tell employers that the guy that comes up when they search for him is a completely different guy. It would behoove him to do this no matter what Google does since not everyone uses Google to research job applications.

Back when I was active with online dating, I Googled myself and discovered that I share the same name as the brother of a man

They have.jp domain names that could potentially be siezed. That would be highly disruptive. I'm sure that they also have assets in Japanese banks and do business inside the country. In short, they have plenty of assets under the jurisdiction of Japanese courts should they fail to comply with the court's order. Not being an expert on the local laws of Japan, I can't tell you how relevant the location of the physical server is, but I'd bet it's not that important to the case at hand.

Because the US is the defaco ruler of the internet.. enough of it is hosted here, or requires name resolution through US services, that as far as the DoJ is concerned it has domain over the whole thing. So unless Japan asks the DoJ nicely to do mean things to a US company... it is unlikely to have an impact.

And if they're not planning to turn it off for everyone (which makes sense, some people actually make use of it), at least give others the option to turn it off for just themselves. I personally like autocomplete but I can understand why others wouldn't, and I think we should have the choice.

You are confusing 'auto-complete' with 'instant search results'.'Auto-complete' provides relevant suggestions in the search text box based on what you have typed so far.'Instant results' shows the output of the search without you having to press enter after you have finished typing in the search text box.

More proof that Google's relevance is declining. This guy can't be much of a criminal mastermind, if he can't figure out how to control other people with a devious mind control ray from his Antarctic ice fortress guarded by gene-spliced penguins with huge fangs. Guy can't even master Super Villain 101, but Google insists on telling me he's a notorious criminal.

The Chinese search has special behavior to highlight the search terms in red rather than the default Western-style boldening that is oddly used for Japanese search too when phonetic characters are included. The red really makes his name stand out more prominently in the results.